The Solitude of Latin America

Antonio Pigafetta, a Florentine navigator
who went with Magellan on the first voyage around the world,
wrote, upon his passage through our southern lands of America, a
strictly accurate account that nonetheless resembles a venture
into fantasy. In it he recorded that he had seen hogs with navels
on their haunches, clawless birds whose hens laid eggs on the
backs of their mates, and others still, resembling tongueless
pelicans, with beaks like spoons. He wrote of having seen a
misbegotten creature with the head and ears of a mule, a camel's
body, the legs of a deer and the whinny of a horse. He described
how the first native encountered in Patagonia was confronted with
a mirror, whereupon that impassioned giant lost his senses to the
terror of his own image.

This short and fascinating book, which even then contained the
seeds of our present-day novels, is by no means the most
staggering account of our reality in that age. The Chronicles of
the Indies left us countless others. Eldorado, our so avidly
sought and illusory land, appeared on numerous maps for many a
long year, shifting its place and form to suit the fantasy of
cartographers. In his search for the fountain of eternal youth,
the mythical Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca explored the
north of Mexico for eight years, in a deluded expedition whose
members devoured each other and only five of whom returned, of
the six hundred who had undertaken it. One of the many unfathomed
mysteries of that age is that of the eleven thousand mules, each
loaded with one hundred pounds of gold, that left Cuzco one day
to pay the ransom of Atahualpa and never reached their
destination. Subsequently, in colonial times, hens were sold in
Cartagena de Indias, that had been raised on alluvial land and
whose gizzards contained tiny lumps of gold. One founder's lust
for gold beset us until recently. As late as the last century, a
German mission appointed to study the construction of an
interoceanic railroad across the Isthmus of Panama concluded that
the project was feasible on one condition: that the rails not be
made of iron, which was scarce in the region, but of gold.

Our independence from Spanish domination did not put us beyond
the reach of madness. General Antonio López de Santa Anna,
three times dictator of Mexico, held a magnificent funeral for
the right leg he had lost in the so-called Pastry War. General
Gabriel García Moreno ruled Ecuador for sixteen years as an
absolute monarch; at his wake, the corpse was seated on the
presidential chair, decked out in full-dress uniform and a
protective layer of medals. General Maximiliano Hernández
Martínez, the theosophical despot of El Salvador who had
thirty thousand peasants slaughtered in a savage massacre,
invented a pendulum to detect poison in his food, and had
streetlamps draped in red paper to defeat an epidemic of scarlet
fever. The statue to General Francisco Moraz´n erected in
the main square of Tegucigalpa is actually one of Marshal Ney,
purchased at a Paris warehouse of second-hand sculptures.

Eleven years ago, the Chilean Pablo
Neruda, one of the outstanding poets of our time, enlightened
this audience with his word. Since then, the Europeans of good
will - and sometimes those of bad, as well - have been struck,
with ever greater force, by the unearthly tidings of Latin
America, that boundless realm of haunted men and historic women,
whose unending obstinacy blurs into legend. We have not had a
moment's rest. A promethean president, entrenched in his burning
palace, died fighting an entire army, alone; and two suspicious
airplane accidents, yet to be explained, cut short the life of
another great-hearted president and that of a democratic soldier
who had revived the dignity of his people. There have been five
wars and seventeen military coups; there emerged a diabolic
dictator who is carrying out, in God's name, the first Latin
American ethnocide of our time. In the meantime, twenty million
Latin American children died before the age of one - more than
have been born in Europe since 1970. Those missing because of
repression number nearly one hundred and twenty thousand, which
is as if no one could account for all the inhabitants of Uppsala.
Numerous women arrested while pregnant have given birth in
Argentine prisons, yet nobody knows the whereabouts and identity
of their children who were furtively adopted or sent to an
orphanage by order of the military authorities. Because they
tried to change this state of things, nearly two hundred thousand
men and women have died throughout the continent, and over one
hundred thousand have lost their lives in three small and
ill-fated countries of Central America: Nicaragua, El Salvador
and Guatemala. If this had happened in the United States, the
corresponding figure would be that of one million six hundred
thousand violent deaths in four years.

One million people have fled Chile, a country with a tradition of
hospitality - that is, ten per cent of its population. Uruguay, a
tiny nation of two and a half million inhabitants which
considered itself the continent's most civilized country, has
lost to exile one out of every five citizens. Since 1979, the
civil war in El Salvador has produced almost one refugee every
twenty minutes. The country that could be formed of all the
exiles and forced emigrants of Latin America would have a
population larger than that of Norway.

I dare to think that it is this outsized reality, and not just
its literary expression, that has deserved the attention of the
Swedish
Academy of Letters. A reality not of paper, but one that
lives within us and determines each instant of our countless
daily deaths, and that nourishes a source of insatiable
creativity, full of sorrow and beauty, of which this roving and
nostalgic Colombian is but one cipher more, singled out by
fortune. Poets and beggars, musicians and prophets, warriors and
scoundrels, all creatures of that unbridled reality, we have had
to ask but little of imagination, for our crucial problem has
been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable.
This, my friends, is the crux of our solitude.

And if these difficulties, whose essence we share, hinder us, it
is understandable that the rational talents on this side of the
world, exalted in the contemplation of their own cultures, should
have found themselves without valid means to interpret us. It is
only natural that they insist on measuring us with the yardstick
that they use for themselves, forgetting that the ravages of life
are not the same for all, and that the quest of our own identity
is just as arduous and bloody for us as it was for them. The
interpretation of our reality through patterns not our own,
serves only to make us ever more unknown, ever less free, ever
more solitary. Venerable Europe would perhaps be more perceptive
if it tried to see us in its own past. If only it recalled that
London took three hundred years to build its first city wall, and
three hundred years more to acquire a bishop; that Rome labored
in a gloom of uncertainty for twenty centuries, until an Etruscan
King anchored it in history; and that the peaceful Swiss of
today, who feast us with their mild cheeses and apathetic
watches, bloodied Europe as soldiers of fortune, as late as the
Sixteenth Century. Even at the height of the Renaissance, twelve
thousand lansquenets in the pay of the imperial armies sacked and
devastated Rome and put eight thousand of its inhabitants to the
sword.

I do not mean to embody the illusions of Tonio Kröger, whose
dreams of uniting a chaste north to a passionate south were
exalted here, fifty-three years ago, by Thomas Mann. But I do believe that those
clear-sighted Europeans who struggle, here as well, for a more
just and humane homeland, could help us far better if they
reconsidered their way of seeing us. Solidarity with our dreams
will not make us feel less alone, as long as it is not translated
into concrete acts of legitimate support for all the peoples that
assume the illusion of having a life of their own in the
distribution of the world.

Latin America neither wants, nor has any reason, to be a pawn
without a will of its own; nor is it merely wishful thinking that
its quest for independence and originality should become a
Western aspiration. However, the navigational advances that have
narrowed such distances between our Americas and Europe seem,
conversely, to have accentuated our cultural remoteness. Why is
the originality so readily granted us in literature so
mistrustfully denied us in our difficult attempts at social
change? Why think that the social justice sought by progressive
Europeans for their own countries cannot also be a goal for Latin
America, with different methods for dissimilar conditions? No:
the immeasurable violence and pain of our history are the result
of age-old inequities and untold bitterness, and not a conspiracy
plotted three thousand leagues from our home. But many European
leaders and thinkers have thought so, with the childishness of
old-timers who have forgotten the fruitful excess of their youth
as if it were impossible to find another destiny than to live at
the mercy of the two great masters of the world. This, my
friends, is the very scale of our solitude.

In spite of this, to oppression, plundering and abandonment, we
respond with life. Neither floods nor plagues, famines nor
cataclysms, nor even the eternal wars of century upon century,
have been able to subdue the persistent advantage of life over
death. An advantage that grows and quickens: every year, there
are seventy-four million more births than deaths, a sufficient
number of new lives to multiply, each year, the population of New
York sevenfold. Most of these births occur in the countries of
least resources - including, of course, those of Latin America.
Conversely, the most prosperous countries have succeeded in
accumulating powers of destruction such as to annihilate, a
hundred times over, not only all the human beings that have
existed to this day, but also the totality of all living beings
that have ever drawn breath on this planet of misfortune.

On a day like today, my master William Faulkner said, "I decline to
accept the end of man". I would fall unworthy of standing in this
place that was his, if I were not fully aware that the colossal
tragedy he refused to recognize thirty-two years ago is now, for
the first time since the beginning of humanity, nothing more than
a simple scientific possibility. Faced with this awesome reality
that must have seemed a mere utopia through all of human time,
we, the inventors of tales, who will believe anything, feel
entitled to believe that it is not yet too late to engage in the
creation of the opposite utopia. A new and sweeping utopia of
life, where no one will be able to decide for others how they
die, where love will prove true and happiness be possible, and
where the races condemned to one hundred years of solitude will
have, at last and forever, a second opportunity on earth.